Hawaiian Electric was warned of flaws before fires

Dated systems, inadequate plans cited by officials

Hawaiian Electric has known for years that extreme weather was becoming more dangerous, but the company did little to strengthen its equipment and failed to adopt emergency plans used elsewhere, including being prepared to cut off power to prevent fires.

Before the wildfire on Maui erupted Aug. 8, killing more than 100 people, many parts of Hawaiian Electric’s operations were showing signs of stress — and state lawmakers consumer groups and county officials were saying that the company needed to make big changes.

In 2019, Hawaiian Electric itself started citing the risk of fires. The company said that year it was studying how utilities in California were dealing with similar threats.

Two years later, in a report about Hurricane Lane in 2018, the Maui County government warned of the potential that “aboveground power lines that fail, short or are low-hanging can cause [sparks] that could start a wildfire, particularly in windy or stormy conditions.”

But it wasn’t until last year that the company asked state regulators to authorize it to spend $190 million to strengthen power poles and other equipment — a request that is still pending. Even when it is approved, the work will take several years to complete.

Attention turned to the company after the emergence of a video recorded Aug. 8 that appeared to show a power line in Lahaina throwing off sparks and igniting dry grass just hours before the fire devastated the city. In addition, data from sensors appear to show major faults with the company’s systems just as the wind picked up.

“This is not a highly reinforced system,” Robert McCullough, of McCullough Research, an energy consulting firm in Portland, Ore., said.

Utility executives and regulators across the United States have been stunned by the ferocity and frequency of weather-related disasters in recent years, including several major wildfires in California and the 2021 winter storm in Texas that left much of the state without light or heat for days.

But energy experts say these calamities and their effect on electric grids should not have been surprising. In many places, utilities have neglected to sufficiently maintain and improve electric grids for decades, and regulators and lawmakers have largely looked the other way.

“The problem with the electric utilities in the United States is they act like the protected monopolies in the face of catastrophic risk,” said Michael Wara, a scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University who thinks Hawaiian Electric could have done a lot more to prevent its equipment from becoming a potential cause of fires. “But nature doesn’t care that they’re a protected monopoly. You need to act like a regular company facing a major risk.”

Hawaiian Electric is a unique utility. Because the state is made up of islands spread over 1,500 miles, the company operates many electric grids and imports fuel to run power plants. As a result, the state has the highest electricity rates in the country, making it harder to invest in grid upgrades.

“There’s always been a push and pull on how to pay for it,” state Senator Gilbert S.C. KeithAgaran said. “The utility doesn’t want to pay for it unless they can pass on the cost to the ratepayers.”

The $190 million proposal Hawaiian Electric made to improve its grid would have replaced aging power poles with new ones, including 80 in Maui. Energy experts said many of the company’s poles were probably not strong enough to withstand winds that hit Lahaina.

Some of the company’s poles are surrounded by invasive grasses that can become explosive tinder in the dry season. Experts have long warned that too little was being done to check the growth of the grasses.

“A lot of our concerns were that this infrastructure is way past due,” said Jennifer Potter, a former member of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission who lives on Maui, pointing in particular to the poles. “Many that have been compromised have been compromised for years.”

The commission did not respond to a request for comment.

Hawaiian Electric said it had spent $111 million on vegetation management and $287 million on equipment replacement, strengthening the grid, inspections, and using technology like drones and laser imagery to monitor the grid since 2018.

“We’re going to look at every decision we made, every tactic we employed to act on the wildfire threat on Maui,” said Jim Kelly, a spokesperson for the utility. “Outside voices speak confidently about ... what we did or didn’t do, but the facts are that we took the threat seriously and were confronted by an extraordinary climatological event.”

But some experts say the utility should have done more.

Henry Curtis, executive director of Life of the Land, a Hawaii nonprofit group that represents consumers before the state Public Utilities Commission, said he supports power shut-off programs.

“We’ve been raising climate change for more than two decades, and the utility has been really slow in dealing with it,” Curtis said. “Certainly Hawaiian Electric knew that Lahaina was the most vulnerable place. They’ve known that for years.”